Tag Archives: wolff

Class, Mon, 1/30

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Introductions: Covers and remixes

Coming to terms with Old School

  • Rebecca Dickerson, “Are Words More Than Words?”
  • Tobias Wollf, Interview
  • Alex Kreger, “Reading’s All Write”
  • Anna Lamb, “Mistaken Identity”

Why does the writer plagiarize Susan Friedman’s story?
What does the novel suggest the relationship between imitation and originality?

  • Ernest Hemingway reads the narrator’s “Summer Dance” (135–38)
  • Susan Friedman reads the narrator’s “Summer Dance” (161-63)

x3: Posner

To Do

  1. Wed, 2/01, class: Read Posner
  2. Thurs, 2/02, 9:00 am: Post x3 to Dropbox

Class, Wed, 1/25

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Introductions: Cover songs and remixes

Gladwell/x1 (cont.)

  • Ben Schwab, “Pride and Progress”

Old School

All of us owed someone, Hemingway or cummings or Kerouac—or all of them, and more. We wouldn’t have admitted to it, but the knowledge was surely there, because imitation was the only charge we never brought against the submissions we mocked so cruelly. There was no profit in it. Once crystallized, consciousness of influence would have doomed the collective and necessary fantasy that our work was purely our own. (14)

There are four moments in Old School when an author comments on the work of student who is trying to write in their style or spirit.

  • Robert Frost reads George Kellogg’s “First Frost” (39–43)
  • Ayn Rand reads Jeff Purcell’s “The Day the Cows Came Home” (76–79)
  • Ernest Hemingway reads the narrator’s “Summer Dance” (135–38)
  • Susan Friedman reads the narrator’s “Summer Dance” (161-63)

What’s going on in these scenes” How well (or not) does the master seem to understand the work of the disciple? What point might about imitation, style, and identity might Wolff be trying to make?

x2 and x3

Moment of Zen

Tobias Wolff talks about Old School

To Do

  1. Fri, 1/27, 9:00 am: Post x2 to Dropbox.
  2. Mon, 1/30, class: Discuss x2 and Old School
  3. Wed, 2/01, class: Discuss Posner
  4. Thurs, 2/02, 9:00 am: Post x3 to Dropbox.

x2: Wolff

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“Anyone who read this story would know who I was” (127). So says the narrator of Old School as he finishes typing “Summer Dance,” the story that will win him a chance to meet with his idol,  Ernest Hemingway. The irony, of course, is that the narrator has—by anyone’s standards, including his own—stolen “Summer Dance” from another writer, a young woman at another school, literally retyping her story while making only those changes needed to identify him rather than her as its author.

Please write a brief essay (750 words or so) in which you try to make sense of this charged and troubling moment in the novel. The narrator of Old School is, after all, a pretty likable, and it would seem, honest young man. So how could copying someone else’s work possibly feel authentic or true to him (even if he later regrets his decision)? How might his plagiarism be connected to his (and the other boys’) baldfaced attempts to imitate authors like Frost, Rand, and Hemingway? How might it be connected to the misimpression that Dean Makepeace almost allows to destroy his career? How might it be connected to the stunning appropriation of the Bible that Wollf ends his novel with?

What I hope is not that you will answer each of the questions above, one after the next, but that you will use them to reflect on what Old School suggests about the links between imitation, plagiarism, and identity.

I look forward to reading what you have to say. Please post your essay to Dropbox by 9:00 am on Fri, 1/27.